Now in trade, the New York Times bestseller that "may well be the best 'historical mystery' ever written." (The Sunday Boston Globe)

"It is 1663, and England is wracked with intrigue and civil strife. When an Oxford don is murdered, it seems at first that the incident can have nothing to do with great matters of church and state....Yet, little is as it seems in this gripping novel, which dramatizes the ways in which witnesses can see the same events yet remember them falsely. Each of four narrators-a Venetian medical student, a young man intent on proving his late father innocent of treason, a cryptographer, and an archivist-fingers a different culprit...an erudite and entertaining tour de force." -People

"Enthralling."-San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"Ingenious."-The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Successful literary thrillers in the mold of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose are the stuff of a publisher's dreams, and in Pears' novel they may have found a near-perfect example of the genre...Pears, with a painstaking, almost forensic attention to detail, constructs his world like a master painter..."-New York Times

"Fascinating...quite extraordinary...elevates the murder mystery to the category of high art."-Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Brings not merely a huge cast of characters but a whole century vividly to life."-Newsweek

Groups with this in collection

NY Times Notable Book Club (118)

• historicalfictionCharlotte Library